Yahoo & Del.icio.us

Happy Friday! I’m really pleased to write that Yahoo closed an acquisition of the social bookmarking service del.icio.us. Congratulations to everyone involved in making this happen. Along with the earlier acquisitions of upcoming.org and flickr, Yahoo is well on it’s way to bringing the best of the new web to the masses.

There are lots of questions as to what Yahoo is going to do with this service, some more obvious than others. I like to think that the social tagging aspect of the service will serve to inform the Yahoo service on what’s important and one up our neighbors up the road. Earlier this week, Bradley Horowitz, a Director in the Search team, was interviewed by the Financial Times and spoke about how the Page Rank algorithm gives too much influence to the webmasters:

But, as Mr Horowitz points out, the hierarchy is decided by webmasters, the controllers of website content: “The webmasters get to vote by proxy on what’s important to all of us; they cast everyone’s vote, so we are slaves to the webmaster’s idea of what is important.”

He goes on: “This next phase of personal and social search means that we will empower individuals with the privilege of voting on what’s important for them and expose that so communities and social networks and other groups can leverage that information. The intention is to base social search on open standards in order to spread its influence beyond the Yahoo environment.